The Brevity of Life

The human heart begins to beat 18 days after conception and to this day doctors and medical experts cannot explain why. Yet as incredible as life is, from its first beat to final breath, life is relatively short — about 28,000 days on average. It may sound like a lot but when we consider that about half of those days are spent sleeping, it’s not hard to see why people say times flies! And when we factor in that the average person spends about 4800 days watching TV, suddenly life seems very short.

Another way of looking at the brevity of life is to consider that by the time people hit their thirties, they’re already nearing the halfway point of life! Life is short no matter how we look at it — a blink and it’s gone. There are no dress rehearsals and no re-dos. We get one shot at each day and no matter what we’re going through, our goal should be to make every day count. So how can we seize the day?

A mistake many people make is to equate making every day count to getting a lot of stuff done. Even though we’ve become masters of organizing, scheduling, prioritizing, delegating and multi-tasking, if our life is nothing more than a never-ending to-do list than we’ve missed the point.

In Psalm 90, a prayer of Moses, we find a verse that has always interested me. In verse 12 Moses asks God, “Teach us to number our days right, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” The object is not to create a list of 28,000 bullet points, but more on the lines of maintaining the right perspective: God is infinite, we are finite. When this outlook governs our heart life becomes not so much about how much can I accomplish, but how deeply can I worship God, the Creator of everything.

In Psalm 139, the Bible also tells us that God created our inmost being and that He ordained all the days of our life before any of them came to be. This is an amazing statement of the significance of your life and mine. We have been divinely designed for a specific purpose. And according to Ephesians 2:10, our design and purpose are activated in Christ.

This truth should be a source of strength for every Believer and it should create a confidence for living life to the fullest every day. Just like Paul encouraged the Colossians to make the most of every opportunity, we should seek to maximize every circumstance and occasion for the glory of God.Life may be short and at times tough. In fact, sometimes the seasons we walk through may seem unbearable and deeply painful, but those are the times to push deeper into Christ and remember that our life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3).